February 25, 2017

It seems to me that psychology would benefit from taking a break from publishing new findings and clean house of all the junk that has accumulated over the years. Junk breeds junk, and if left unchecked can generate entire unwholesome disciplines (as the sad state of the social sciences proves to us daily).

Gervais & Norenzayan (2012) reported in Science a series of 4 experiments in which manipulations intended to foster analytic thinking decreased religious belief. We conducted a precise, large, multi-site pre-registered replication of one of these experiments. We observed little to no effect of the experimental manipulation on religious belief (d = 0.07 in the wrong direction, 95% CI[-0.12, 0.25], N = 941). The original finding does not seem to provide reliable or valid evidence that analytic thinking causes a decrease in religious belief.

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